ALL, Maurizio Cattelan’s atrium-filling exhibit at the Guggenheim, is at once extraordinarily simple and remarkably complex. It manages, at every turn down the ramp, to be entirely new in spite of being able to view the entire construction at once. One can see everything and nothing, and the composition is both utterly finite and seemingly infinite.
This is, of course, precisely the same premise as Wright’s Guggenheim. It is a discrete object, perhaps the most object-like building in New York (a city of non-objects) and an idea suggesting its own infinite extension.
ALL manages this clever trick by completely confounding the prescribed diagram of the museum; art goes around the outside, the glory of the central space is what makes the building into art. Cattelan inverts this idea and makes the center space the gallery and the ramp mere circulation. He occupies the space that Wright intended as his own and owns the museum as few other artists have.
Tino Sehgal attempted to subvert the same edifice when he emptied it of all physical art in favor of a circular experience on the ramp. His experience was bounded by the youngest and the oldest participants in his child to senior story telling sequence. As life expectancy increases Sehgal’s installation allowed for the infinite, in an upward spiral to the heavens, but left it to the building’s formal ‘parti’ to suggest infinite extension.
The installations that most pervert the museum, at the same time, bolster the museum’s sense of possibility. While there has long been a ‘he said/she said’ debate about whether the Guggenheim is a great or a horrible place to view art, it has taken an artist to explain just how transcendent Wright’s spiral really is.
